The primary mechanism for connecting to Research Computing systems, submitting work, and monitoring progress, and retrieve results is ssh. We have our ssh authentication mechanism tied into RIT’s LDAP service, so you don’t have to remember a separate username and password for RC services – it’s the same as your RIT credentials! If you don’t know what those are, you probably need to get in touch with ITS first.

The following steps will walk you through how to setup ssh on your local desktop or laptop and connect to Research Computing for the first time.

X11-forwarding

If you’re going to be doing interactive graphical work, you will want to enable the forwarding of X11 windows.

First, download and install Xming-mesa. Once installed, you’ll need to make sure this program is running before you connect with putty. It is a background application and will only run with a little status icon in your system tray.

Once Xming-mesa is installed and running, open up putty again, but before connecting you’ll need to navigate to the menu item on the left side of the window and ‘enable X11 forwarding’.

Once this is done, you can connect as before. You can test that this works by running the following on lmc.rc.rit.edu:

$ xclock

If a clock appears on your desktop, then you have correctly configured X11 forwarding.